Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy Jig!

December 13-15, 2007 (minus a fair chunk of the 14th!)

We left Mendoza at 8.30am local time Thursday moring (10.30pm Thursday night AEST). We jumped on a bus to Santiago, Chile and cruised through some of the equally best mountain scenery we'd seen from inside a bus on our travels. We drove over, around and through the tallest part of the Andes in South America and past the tallest mountain in the world outside Asia. We experience another excruciating border crossing which delayed our bus by about 3 hours and Davo almost got us into a lot of trouble for trying to explain he had yerba mate (the herbal tea) in his bag. The customs officer (understandably) misinterpreted his exclamations of 'yo tengo yerba' - 'I have herb' accompanied by the action of sipping on a straw (looks nothing like pulling on a joint) as that we were druggos trying to smuggle marijuana!

About 9 or 10 hours and two small ham and cheese sandwiches each later, we were off the bus and carrying our ridiculously heavy bags one last time to the bus to the airport. After this point it was all on trolleys baby, yeehah! An all you can eat buffet cured our hunger at the airport and from then on we had no hitches, it was smooth sailing back home.

Goodbye South America; goodbye sleeping in cheap hostels in crappy dorms with abnoxious, filthy snorers; goodbye putting toilet paper in bins beside the toilet; goodbye meeting new and exciting people in new and exciting places; goodbye the best steaks in the world; goodbye travel and hello Australia!
We got off the plane at Melbourne airport at 11.00am Saturday morning AEST (1.00am Saturday morning Mendoza time) about 40 hours after our journey home began.